Page 17 of Heartbeat

“In a good way, right?”

I simply raised both eyebrows, still smiling.

It was then I noticed he was freezing. When I turned to face Noah, I realized he wasn’t wearing a jacket.

“Are you insane?” I said, coming to a full stop and dropping my backpack on the pavement.

And yes, it wasn’t lost on me how odd it was having a former mental patient asking someone if they were in full possession of their mental faculties.

“What?” Noah asked, clueless.

“You’re gonna freeze to death.” I took off my jacket and handed it to him.

“I forgot to grab mine,” he said, taking the jacket from me.

He didn’t put it on; he merely stared at it for a few moments.

“This is your favorite jacket,” he said, without making eye contact.

“So? Put it on, dumbass.” I took his backpack from him so he could put on my jacket.

He did so without protesting. I was three inches taller, but it actually looked good on him.

“Your friends keep asking me about you,” Noah said, still refraining from looking me in the eye.

“Yeah, I haven’t been very good at keeping in touch. Sorry about that.” I handed him back his bag and resumed our walk. We were two blocks away from Magnolia.

“I just…I never know what to say.” He looked down at the pavement.

For a moment, I wasn’t sure if we were both talking about the same thing.

“Noah—”

“I gotta go,” he said, already walking faster, away from me.

I could never get Noah to talk about that night. To be fair, it wasn’t a conversation I was eager to have either. But as time passed and the longer I’d been back, it seemed to get more important to discuss it—though the longer we took ignoring it also made it harder for the subject to get casually inserted into normal conversation.

*

As I tried to remember the combination to my locker, I felt like slamming my hand on it as hard as possible, if only to give my brain something else to focus on instead of the incessant pounding coupled with my stomach being in knots. I knelt to rummage in my bag for the paper the school had given me with the combination I’d been sure was so easy to recall I’d barely paid attention to it the day before.

“He is such a piece of shit!” I heard a girl say.

“Maybe he just forgot,” another girl added.

I turned to get a quick glance at three girls, all seemingly the same age and looking like replicas of one another, walking in my direction. Their long, blonde hair waved from side to side as they moved.

“You forget to pick up laundry; standing someone up is being a shit,” the angriest of the three said.

They came to a full stop to my right, then opened their respective lockers and started taking books from them.

“Did he at least give you a reason?”

“Barely. He just said something came up.”

“See? Total shit.” The angriest girl closed her locker door with a bang.

“Maybe something did come up though.”

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